Lagniappe

Why Microsoft and Adobe are laughing all the way to the bank

I recently got an email from a friend. She is looking to purchase a new computer. Apparently a friend of her's works at Dell and he spec'ed out a pretty decent machine at a good price with his discounts.

Then she asked about software. Will Adobe Photoshop work on this computer, and how much will it cost? I did a quick survey of Froogle, Amazon, and Adobe's own web site and determined that a legal copy would cost pretty close to the list price of $650. This was almost as much as the cost of the computer.

Cool Free Software #3

I've been meaning to write reviews or descriptions of the cool free software I've found lately, but I've found so much of it recently that I've been unable to write descriptions. I'm going ahead and publishing this page to get the list out, and hope to be able to come back and annotate it later.

New applications (or ones I've recently discovered)

World Wind
Audacity
Filezilla (FTP program for Windows)
Fetch (FTP program for Mac; free educational license)
Nvu
OpenOffice
Yahoo Widget Engine
Flickr - includes application for mass uploads (uploading a whole folder or more) at a time; limited free account; unlimited account for $25/year. Easy editing, tagging, group sites, security, CD or DVD backups

Major updates to applications I've mentioned before (in Cool Free Software #1, or Cool Free Software #2):

RSSOwl
Google Earth
Google Desktop

Happy Birthday, Web

This weekend (through the Christmas holiday, depending on how you interpret it) marks the 15th birthday of the World Wide Web. Both the concept of hypertext and the Internet had been around for a long time, but on November 12th, 1990 Tim Berners-Lee wrote a formal proposal for the World Wide Web to his employers at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) particle physics lab. On November 13th he wrote the first draft of a web page.

During the Christmas holiday of that year, Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004) built all of the tools necessary for a working web, including a web server and a web browser. In August of 1991 a web server at CERN was put on the Internet.

The majority of teen Internet users create, remix or share content online

Fully half of all teens, and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet, could be considered Content Creators, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some interesting findings from their survey include:

33 percent of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos.
32 percent say that they have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including groups they belong to, friends or school assignments.
22 percent report keeping their own personal webpage.
19 percent of online teens keep a blog, and 38 percent of online teens read blogs.
19 percent of Internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Pew Charitable Trusts' Press Release
Full Report - Teen Content Creators and Consumers

Growth of the Blogosphere

Have you updated your blog lately? Do you have a blog? If you don't, you will soon.

An analysis of recent data from Technorati by Nicholas Carr ( It beats talking to yourself ) indicates that if you don't have a blog, you will in a few years. In fact, at the current rate of growth, everyone on Earth today will have a blog in 3 and a half years, no later than 2010.

Technorati has issued it's latest report on the continued growth in the number of blogs. The number has been doubling every 5 months for at least the last 36 months.

Writing for the web

It has become passe that writing for the web is different from writing for paper.

shorter

use links

link guidelines (from airhigh/knowbility)

link text should make sense out of context, in a list of links.
descriptive link text lets the user know where the link goes. [indicates to search engines that you know what you're talking about]
links to the same place should have the same name; links to different pages should be different.
Test the links out of context
Raw links ( where the link is http:// followed by the URI) are difficult for those using a screen reader to interpret. The screen reader reads the URI and usually doesn't convey any information.
Avoid duplicate adjacent links

lead with your most important stuff

Giving Up or Getting Real?

The Secret of Impressive Writing? Keep It Plain and Simple

How Users Read on the Web (Jakob Nielsen)

Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web (Jakob Nielsen)

Cool Free Software #2

One of the neatest pieces of software I've seen come along in a long time is "Google Earth." One of the neatest things about it it that it's free.

Google has assembled a huge database of satellite and aerial photography and laid it on top of a globe that you can rotate, tilt, and zoom in to. The detail is amazing. Kids can actually manipulate maps by dragging the map to scroll and moving a slider bar to tilt or zoom the map. Maps can be rotated, for instance to look at Texas as viewed from Mexico, California, or Louisiana. Teachers can save placemarks for student assignments or projects.